Executive Summary Electricity is the connective tissue of the information age, powering everything from smartphones to giant data centers and enabling virtually every transaction in daily life. Electricity is the lifeblood of both buildings (72 percent) and industry (28 percent). The U.S. electricity system is the greatest engineering achievement of…

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Energy Secretary Rick Perry told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is actually independent and not at his command, to rush through the most drastic regulatory change in decades, bailing out uncompetitive coal and nuclear plants at the expense of customers and cheaper competitors. His proposal is strongly opposed by practically every part of the energy industry except its beneficiaries—coal and nuclear power.

The Secretary claims these increasingly uncompetitive 1970s technologies are vital to a reliable and resilient electricity supply. RMI’s rigorous, documented, and devastating comments to FERC show the Secretary has it exactly backwards: his proposed non-solution to a virtual non-problem would actually worsen electric resilience and harm national security. (Many of the reasons were first shown over three decades ago in our Pentagon study Brittle Power—still the foundational unclassified study of energy resilience.) Instead, RMI suggests strengthening modern market trends and application of conservative economic principles. Then the best buys, chiefly efficiency and renewables, can provide far more secure electricity that’s also cheaper, cleaner, and better for jobs and competitiveness.